Ronnie McGinn's Poetry Page

Christine Potter of New York, wrote "Lost Internet Postings from the Week After 9/11", to her friend Terese Coe, who is a popular contributor to this column.

While the events 9/11 will forever envelope us in horror, Christine's poem is a psychological revelation of effects, simultaneously moving swiftly and ponderously.

Its humanity captures the whisper and the roar of our indelible emotions with flexibility and natural eloquence. The poem lends itself to many readings.

Christine tells us she has been head moderator of the internet poetry forum called The Gazebo since dinosaurs roamed the earth. It's at www.alsopreview.com.

She has published pretty extensively online and on plain old paper, in small magazines like The Pedestal, Stirring, and Barnwood.

She has a book, "Zero Degrees At First Light", that came out in 2006, on David Robert Books.

Lost Internet Postings from the Week after 9/11
For Terese

The downtown air was bad, you said, so red
bandanas across the nose and mouth
were the latest vogue. You didn't much
mention the dead, more your neighborhood--
luminous on my TV screen as foreign
capitals under siege, but with familiar trees
and old brick apartment buildings--people
marketing and walking the streets anyway.

I remember mostly how you wrote, not what--
like ice cubes chiming in the amber glass
of bourbon beside my computer keyboard.
How chic to be so plucky, and afraid,
and lost...papers blown into doorways,
wrapped around the grates of storm drains,
torn letterheads. I never printed out

those journals, nor did you. There was
too much else to track, too much missing,
missing still. Twenty miles up the Hudson,
I hosed black dust off white garden chairs
and knew--that empty, empty sky,
that lying sun, that gorgeous blue.

© Christine Potter